“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

‘Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.’

Sisters and brothers,1 who among you has deliberately killed someone? When did you last set fire to a car? How many of you steal bottles of wine from the supermarket?

Why not, exactly?

I’m sure you can think of many reasons that you’ve never done such a thing and never would. And the strongest ones come easily: that’s against the law. Only a criminal would do such a thing. I’m not an arsonist or a thief. It is easy to consider things in these categories: criminal, law-abiding citizen; illegal equals wrong, convicted equals evil. It is harder to consider them critically.

I

We think of ourselves as law-abiding citizens, people who live according to the democratically legitimated rules of society and who derive from that a demand of others that they do the same. I abide by the traffic laws, and all the drivers around me had better do the same. I don’t steal from the supermarket, always buy a ticket before I get in the U-Bahn, I don’t piss in people’s doorways. And that’s what I expect from the people around me. And if I manage to fill out my tax return every year and get it in complete and on time, Uli Hoeneß2 ought to be able to do the same. And if I don’t appreciate someone’s behaviour, I complain respectfully and matter-of-factly according to the established procedure, instead of just punching him in the face. This mutual self-restraint sows peace, makes society possible. Not for nothing to they speak at graduation from Harvard Law School of the law as being the ‘wise restraints that make men free.’

The law makes possible many of the things that are fundamental to our peaceful and prosperous lifestyle. It is the origin of ownership and property. It legitimizes our enforcement of these rights against others. It balances the imbalance of power: ‘I have been called to give justice a status in the country’, wrote Hammurabi in the first code of laws in human history, ‘that the strong should not overcome the weak’. Our rules and the legal system they create are the precondition – but also the product – of our society and culture.

II

So it was, too, for the Pharisee Paul. Living in the diaspora, a strictly observant Jew surrounded by goyim who were at best unmoved by God’s instructions, his observance of the law of the Torah was a central element of his identity. Identity as it differentiated him from others, and identity as it anchors and gives the self a sense of security.

And for him, God’s instruction through the laws of the Torah were comparable with our statutes. In the orthodox society in which he lived, they were generally recognized as binding. They determined the functioning of society in almost every facet of daily life. They decided the procedure for resolving disputes. And he could have lost everything if he had broken them.

The laws passed by our parliament have a different source of legitimacy, to be sure. And they no longer seamlessly transition into provisions on correct religious practice. But they organize and bind us because we recognize them as legitimate under the rules of the legal system, and that gives them the same position in our society as the Tora had in Paul’s.

III

But Paul doesn’t seem to think much of this tool for social ordering. He was ‘blameless’ under the law, and it brought him nothing, he writes. ‘Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss.’

Brothers and sisters, these are not the words of a law-breaker, nor of someone who no longer loves the law because the grapes have become sour. This is not the complaint of an Uli Hoeneß who has come to regard German tax law as a loss. No, these are the words of a law-abiding citizen whose enthusiastic compliance has not led him to redemption, who eats and eats at the buffet of obedience and good behaviour and yet remains hungry.

And so I ask again: we all feel anger – why hasn’t anyone here murdered someone? Wine bottles fit so nicely under the Geneva gown – why don’t I swipe them from the supermarket?

Those questions are easy rhetoric. You’ve already recognized what I’m getting at: it is not because they’re illegal that I do not do these things, but because they are wrong. And that becomes clearer upon closer examination of the real degree to which we abide by the law. Even the pillar of society tends to speed a little now and then, crosses the street when the light is red, or maybe even lets his ID card lapse without renewing it. If the law doesn’t engage our sense of right and wrong, it’s not so important after all.

Might it be, brothers and sisters, that right and wrong are not determined by the law, but by something else?

IV

Paul distances himself from laws with whose legitimacy he no longer identifies and from which he as a Christian no longer profits. The Torah is no longer a part of his identity, has become foreign to him. But we as Christians are also Germans and Europeans. The law is ours, has developed from our Christian culture. We cannot so easily turn away from the law and toward Christ.

But our laws sometimes also conflict with the message of the Gospel. On our first day legal persons, a member of the people of Europe from the tribe of the civic-minded, we are capitalists born of capitalists; as to the law, obedient citizens; as to zeal, though, Frontex-tolerators, free-trade supporters, social-welfare cutters, and deporters to Afghanistan. Our laws secure and enable prosperity, yes, but only at the expense of the global South. And through the gaps of our indifference fall even our most fundamental human rights when it comes to things like those affected by German economic activity abroad.

Yet the Gospel continues to make its radical demands, continues to confront this worldly injustice. The Gospel is the reason that we eat and eat at the buffet of prosperity, of the variety of consumer goods, of the safe streets and the affordable fuel and of the exploitatively low-priced groceries yet always remain hungry.

V

My intention is not to start a revolution with the Letter to the Philippians as its manifesto. But I want to sweep aside the easy and false freedom we take for ourselves to take the urgency and the solvability out of the injustices of the present time by pointing to their legality. Paul breaks from his old life by no longer looking at the Gospel through the lens of the Torah, but at the Torah through the lens of the Gospel.

So must we as Christians under the modern rule of law look critically at our constitution and statutes through the lens of the Gospel. We must dissolve the lazy association between law and morality and meet our fellow humans as equals who, no matter how foreign or far away, carry the same spark of the divine in them as we do. Only on that basis can we sensibly organize a society through laws.

Beloved, not that I don’t rely on the law when it makes things easy for me. I do not consider that I have found a solution for every political problem in our world in the Gospel. But this one thing I know: we must forget the bourgeois illusions that lie behind us and strain toward a society ahead that reflects the justice of the Gospel. The love of Christ constrains us to do so. And no Christian has the right to obey, if we take seriously the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. ‘For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.’ Amen.

To the Master of Theology students of the University of Marburg, Summer 2017. Translated from the German by the author. [back]

Sometime national football player, immediate past president of FC Bayern München and, for a German audience in 2017, the most recognizable and notorious large-scale tax evader. Replace as appropriate. [back]

"The present life of man upon earth, oh king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before, we know nothing at all."
– Bede, An Ecclesiastic History of the English Church and People (transl. AM Sellars)

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old.